On Scheduling Game Time

As of today now there are 6 days left in August (not including today), getting close to the end here. Today I thought I’d talk a little bit of a mixture of gaming and personal stuff. So bear with me here.

So if you keep up with me on twitter, or have seen other times I have mentioned this you’ll know that early in July I lost my best friend in the world to depression. It’s been a difficult period in my life because frankly I’ve never had to deal with losing anyone I cared about. To say it’s been difficult is a bit of an understatement but it’s hard to describe how hard it is to come to terms with something like this.

The one thing that seems to help is by keeping myself distracted. Now I don’t mean to say I’m not pretending things didn’t happen, I just have to not think about it sometimes to keep from curling up in a big ball of depression. Lately this has been a lot of Youtube videos but that can’t hold up forever. So my thought is to gather up all the games I have that need finishing, or starting and start working on them. There are a couple of console releases coming out that I’ll be getting, and I have enough games either laying around or on Steam that need playing.

My attempt last night was playing through the Batgirl DLC for Batman: Arkham Knight, but was able to complete it in less than 2 hours. Not to say it wasn’t fun, I just really dislike short DLC and I’m glad I didn’t pay for the season pass.

Coming up next week I have Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain coming out, and that should keep me busy for a couple of weeks. I’ve heard it has enough content in it for that at least. I’m thinking about playing through the MGS: Ground Zeroes story again this weekend just to familiarize myself with the control scheme again, and to refresh myself on the story leading in to The Phantom Pain.

Another game that will come out next month is Super Mario Maker on the Wii U. If you remember one of my previous posts from last week you will know that I bought a Wii U specifically to play this game. I have it pre-ordered on the Nintendo eStore, which is not my usual thing since I prefer to have physical copies. I just didn’t feel like going to Gamestop to pre-order it.

October has the release of the next Assassins Creed game, which depending on how much I play it might take 1 – 2 weeks to complete. I may replay Unity prior to this if I am done with Metal Gear Solid. I’ve said it before that the Assassins Creed series is one of my favorite games series ever, and I tend to replay the games every so often.

I’m not sure about November yet, so this is probably going to be when I start struggling to find things to play. Hopefully though by then things will not be as hard to deal with as they are now and it won’t be as much of an issue. The thing is that this isn’t really a departure from my normal routine anyways. Even before losing my friend most of my at home time was playing games, but now it serves a dual purpose.

Edit: I don’t know how I forgot about Fallout 4 coming out in November *facepalm*

December is a bit iffy. I know there are a couple of games coming out that I’m interested in, but not sure if I’ll be picking them up at release yet. Those games being Just Cause 3 and the new Hitman game. I’m unsure of Just Cause 3 because I’ve never played the other games in the series and to me it looks like it is another GTA style game just with a more destructible environment. Not to say that it will be a bad game, but those types of games are ones that I don’t stick with very long.

The Hitman game I will probably get, but I’m not sure I will get at release. I don’t particularly care for the way they’re handling the release of this one where it is available digital only in December and releasing content a little bit at a time. There will be a physical release as well, but only AFTER all the content has been released. So basically I feel like they’re holding the game hostage. I don’t like the idea that I pay full price for the game but I only get it as the deem it fit to give it to me. I almost just want to wait for the physical release so that I can just have the entire story available at one time.

So the plan for now is to find a nice rotation of things to play. It might be easier to make games stretch out longer if I could play more than one at a time, but I’m pretty bad at that. I’m the type of player that has to finish a game before starting a new one or else I risk not finishing either.

2 thoughts on “On Scheduling Game Time”

I used to wait a lot longer to buy games, but lately if I see a game that really interests me I have to have it on the day it comes out. Thankfully I think that I’ve got it down to 1 game per month for the rest of the year, with the exception of September.